The Lover
It's strange, the vividness with which the dead come to us - in visions, or dreams with the kind of knife-edged clarity that waking life can only imitate.
Lover? No, he never was - except, had you dared, in your imaginings. He never touched you like that. And maybe that's a good thing, you think; maybe his touch would have been like poison, flooding your veins, because although poison is not always bitter, it is always deadly.
But you're deceiving yourself. By any impartial standard you barely knew him, and you never saw his face in the sunlight. All you have to look back on is a handful of meetings - by night, in dark places, or under impenetrable steel-gray skies. And yet the first time you looked at him, a complete stranger half-shrouded in shadow and fear, you felt it: that impossible flood of recognition that the poets, for lack of an adequate word, would probably call love.
You shed blood for him - what was that, if not love? You shed blood for him, and he - what would he say now, if you stood before him in your nightmares?
You know the answer to this; you've dreamed it every night since it happened. Too late, Silencer, he'd say, with that gaping red tongueless travesty of a mouth. You came too late. And what could you say in reply, except: Too soon, Lucien. You left me too soon.
But tonight he comes to you, once again and for the last time - and this time your dreamscape is different: it doesn't look like Applewatch, but like Bravil in a rainstorm. Your face is glistening with something that looks like rain but tastes like the sea, and he is whole again. And in dreams, in death, all the things you never had in waking life can be yours.
So you find your voice, you call him back. A second - nothing, then the black figure reappears. You do as you should have done the first time, and beg him to stay with you. He comes closer, his eyes searching yours. They are just as you remember them, not raw and empty but the deep, gold-tinted brown of warm honey.
Your face and your voice reveal everything. "My Silencer," he says softly, a curious lilt to the voice you know so well, and he reaches out long fingers to brush against your wet face. It goes right through you, and you shudder; so his touch is intoxicating, after all.
It's madness, this, under the circumstances - it would be madness at any time, but the pull is too strong. Beneath your awed hands, the powerful rhythm of his heart as it drives the lifeblood through his veins. His lips on yours, warm and so alive...
When you awaken, abruptly, it is to a lingering sense of his presence, as real as though he's only just drawn away from you. You can still feel the imprint of his body on yours, your bare flesh tingling in the wake of his hands, the resonance of his voice close in your ear. Oh Sithis, you can taste him.
You breathe out, once. "Lucien!" you whisper. Surely he is close by, surely he'll answer-
The room is silent and still. In death, just as in life, he never stays.